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What Study Says...

Study: Vitamins tied to prostate cancer

There's more worrisome news about vitamins: Taking too many may increase men's risk of dying from prostate cancer.

The study, being published Wednesday, doesn't settle the issue. But it is the biggest yet to suggest high-dose multivitamins may harm the prostate, and the latest chapter in the confusing quest to tell whether taking various vitamins really helps a variety of conditions — or is a waste of money, or worse.

Government scientists turned to a study tracking the diet and health of almost 300,000 men. About a third reported taking a daily multivitamin, and 5 percent were heavy users, swallowing the pills more than seven times a week.

Within five years of the study's start, 10,241 men had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Some 1,476 had advanced cancer; 179 died.

Heavy multivitamin users were almost twice as likely to get fatal prostate cancer as men who never took the pills, concludes the study in Wednesday's Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Here's the twist: Overall, the researchers found no link between multivitamin use and early-stage prostate cancer.

The researchers speculate that perhaps high-dose vitamins had little effect until a tumor appeared, and then could spur its growth.

While similar but smaller studies have suggested a link, too, more rigorous research is needed, caution the National Cancer Institute scientists. This newest study involves men who voluntarily took vitamins, and those most at risk — perhaps because they had a family history of the disease — may have been more likely to take the pills in hopes of avoiding their fate.

Still, "the findings lend further credence to the possibility of harm associated with increased use of supplements," Dr. Christian Gluud of Copenhagen University Hospital and Dr. Goran Bjelakovic of Serbia's University of Nis wrote in an accompanying editorial.

What Study Says...

Mormons have less heart disease (AP) -- something doctors have long chalked up to their religion's ban on smoking. New research suggests that another of their "clean living" habits also may be helping their hearts: fasting for one day each month.

A study in Utah, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is based, found that people who skipped meals once a month were about 40 percent less likely to be diagnosed with clogged arteries than those who did not regularly fast.

People did not have to "get religion" to benefit: non-Mormons who regularly took breaks from food also were less likely to have clogged arteries, scientists found.

They concede that their study is far from proof that periodic fasting is good for anyone, but said the benefit they observed poses a theory that deserves further testing.

"It might suggest these are people who just control eating habits better," and that this discipline extends to other areas of their lives that improves their health, said Benjamin Horne, a heart disease researcher from Intermountain Medical Center and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

He led the study and reported results at a recent American Heart Association conference. The research was partly funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Roughly 70 percent of Utah residents are Mormons, whose religion advises abstaining from food on the first Sunday of each month, Horne said.

Researchers got the idea to study fasting after analyzing medical records of patients who had X-ray exams to check for blocked heart arteries between 1994 and 2002 in the Intermountain Health Collaborative Study, a health registry. Of these patients, 4,629 could be diagnosed as clearly having or lacking heart disease - an artery at least 70 percent clogged.

Researchers saw a typical pattern: only 61 percent of Mormons had heart disease compared to 66 percent of non-Mormons.

They thought tobacco use probably accounted for the difference. But after taking smoking into account, they still saw a lower rate of heart disease among Mormons and designed a survey to explore why.

It asked about Mormons' religious practices: monthly fasting; avoiding tea, coffee and alcohol; taking a weekly day of rest; going to church, and donating time or money to charity.

Among the 515 people surveyed, only fasting made a significant difference in heart risks: 59 percent of periodic meal skippers were diagnosed with heart disease versus 67 percent of the others.

The difference persisted even when researchers took weight, age and conditions like diabetes or high cholesterol or blood pressure into account. About 8 percent of those surveyed were not Mormons, and those who regularly fasted had lower rates of heart disease, too.

Horne speculated that when people take a break from food, it forces the body to dip into fat reserves to burn calories. It also keeps the body from being constantly exposed to sugar and having to make insulin to metabolize it. When people develop

diabetes, insulin-producing cells become less sensitive to cues from eating, so fasting may provide brief rests that resensitize these cells and make them work better, he said.

But he and other doctors cautioned that skipping meals is not advised for diabetics - it could cause dangerous swings in blood sugar.

Also for dieters, "the news is not as good as you might think" on fasting, said Dr. Raymond Gibbons of the Mayo Clinic, a former heart association president.

"Fasting resets the metabolic rate," slowing it down to adjust to less food and forcing the body to store calories as soon as people resume eating, Gibbons said.

Study – Belief in God reduces distress

In 1980, when German diplomat Dr. Murad Wilfried Hofman, NATO’s director of information converted to Islam, he wrote that he feel less distressed now than before. Watch a video on talk with Dr. Murad Hofman.

Now a new Brain Study conducted by Michael Inzlicht and Alexa Tullett at the University of Toronto (Scarbrough Campus), published in the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science on August 4, 2010 – proves that people who believe in God are less distressed than the non-believers.

“Eight-five per cent of the world has some sort of beliefs. I think it behooves us as psychologists to study why people have these beliefs; exploring what functions, if any, they may serve,” says Michael Inzlicht.

With two experiments, the researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently—in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride and react with less distress to anxiety-provoking mistakes. Participants either wrote about religion or did a scrambled word task that included religion and God-related words. Then the researchers recorded their brain activity as they completed a computerized task—one that was chosen because it has a high rate of errors. The results showed that when people were primed to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area associated with a number of things, including regulating bodily states of arousal and serving an alerting function when things are going wrong, including when we make mistakes.

Interestingly, atheists reacted differently; when they were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings of distress. In contrast, for atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress.

“Thinking about religion makes you calm under fire. It makes you less distressed when you’ve made an error,” says Inzlicht. “We think this can help us understand some of the really interesting findings about people who are religious. Although not unequivocal, there is some evidence that religious people live longer and they tend to be happier and healthier.” Atheists shouldn’t despair, though. “We think this can occur with any meaning system that provides structure and helps people understand their world.” Maybe atheists would do better if they were primed to think about their own beliefs, he says.

Study: Daughters provide twice as much care for aging parents

Study: Youth now have more mental health issues

By MARTHA IRVINE - January 11, 2010

(AP) -- A new study has found that five times as many high school and college students are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era.

The findings, culled from responses to a popular psychological questionnaire used as far back as 1938, confirm what counselors on campuses nationwide have long suspected as more students struggle with the stresses of school and life in general.

"It's another piece of the puzzle - that yes, this does seem to be a problem, that there are more young people who report anxiety and depression," says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and the study's lead author. "The next question is: what do we do about it?"

Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external - from wealth to looks and status - has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues.

Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by Twenge, researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who, from 1938 through 2007, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review.

Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate - with six times as many scoring high in two areas:

- "hypomania," a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5 percent of students in 1938 to 31 percent in 2007)

- and depression (from 1 percent to 6 percent).

Twenge said the most current numbers may even be low given all the students taking antidepressants and other psychotropic medications, which help alleviate symptoms the survey asks about.

The study also showed increases in "psychopathic deviation," which is loosely related to psychopathic behavior in a much milder form and is defined as having trouble with authority and feeling as though the rules don't apply to you. The percentage of young people who scored high in that category increased from 5 percent in 1938 to 24 percent in 2007.

Twenge previously documented the influence of pop culture pressures on young people's mental health in her 2006 book "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before." Several studies also have captured the growing interest in being rich, with 77 percent of those questioned for UCLA's 2008 national survey of college freshmen saying it was "essential" or "very important" to be financially well off.

Experts say such high expectations are a recipe for disappointment. Meanwhile, they also note some well-meaning but overprotective parents have left their children with few real-world coping skills, whether that means doing their own budget or confronting professors on their own.

"If you don't have these skills, then it's very normal to become anxious," says Dr. Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City who hopes the new study will be a wake-up call to those parents.

Students themselves point to everything from pressure to succeed - self-imposed and otherwise - to a fast-paced world that's only sped up by the technology they love so much.

Sarah Ann Slater, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Miami, says she feels pressure to be financially successful, even when she doesn't want to.

"The unrealistic feelings that are ingrained in us from a young age - that we need to have massive amounts of money to be considered a success - not only lead us to a higher likelihood of feeling inadequate, anxious or depressed, but also make us think that the only value in getting an education is to make a lot of money, which is the wrong way to look at it," says Slater, an international studies major who plans to go to graduate school overseas.

The study is not without its skeptics, among them Richard Shadick, a psychologist who directs the counseling center at Pace University in New York. He says, for instance, that the sample data weren't necessarily representative of all college students. (Many who answered the MMPI questionnaire were students in introductory psychology courses at four-year institutions.)

Shadick says his own experience leaves little doubt more students are seeking mental health services. But he and others think that may be due in part to heightened awareness of such services. Twenge notes the MMPI isn't given only to those who seek services.

Others, meanwhile, say the research helps advance the conversation with hard numbers.

"It actually provides some support to the observations," says Scott Hunter, director of pediatric neuropsychology at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital. Before his current post, Hunter was at the University of Virginia, where his work included counseling a growing number of students with mental health concerns.

While even Twenge concedes more research is needed to pinpoint a cause, Hunter says the study "also helps us understand what some of the reasons behind it might be." He notes Twenge's inclusion of data showing that factors such as materialism among young people have had a similar upswing. She also noted that divorce rates for their parents have gone up, which may lead to less stability.

Amid it all, Hunter says this latest generation has been raised in a "you can do anything atmosphere." And that, he says, "sets up a lot of false expectation" that inevitably leads to distress for some.

It's also meant heartache for parents.

"I don't remember it being this hard," says a mother from northern New Jersey, whose 15-year-old daughter is being treated for depression. She asked not to be identified to respect her daughter's privacy.

"We all wanted to be popular, but there wasn't this emphasis on being perfect and being super skinny," she says. "In addition, it's 'How much do your parents make?'

"I'd like to think that's not relevant, but I can't imagine that doesn't play a role."

Dangerous Bacteria found on McDonald's equipment, Gas Pumps, and other public things

Gas pump handles top study of filthy surfaces

by Alina Selyukh - Oct 25, 2011

Just when you thought filling up your car could not hurt any more, researchers may have found another reason to avoid touching the gas pump: germs.

Gas pump handles turned out to be the filthiest surface that Americans encounter on the way to work, according to a study released on Tuesday by Kimberly-Clark Professional, a unit of personal hygiene giant Kimberly-Clark Corp.

A team of hygienists swabbed hundreds of surfaces around six U.S. cities to see what everyday objects are breeding grounds for the worst bacteria and viruses.

The top offenders, following gas pumps, were handles on public mailboxes, escalator rails and ATM buttons.

Closely following on the filthiest list were parking meters and kiosks, crosswalk buttons and buttons on vending machines in shopping malls.

"It comes down to the fact that nobody cleans the things that you're going to touch on a daily basis," said Dr. Kelly Arehart, program leader of Kimberly-Clark's Healthy Workplace Project.

Testers analyzed swabs of the surfaces for levels of adenosine triphosphate, which signals the presence of animal, vegetable, bacteria, yeast or mold cells, and the high levels found suggest they can be transmitting illness, researchers said.

Swabs were taken in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia.

Arehart's colleague Brad Reynolds said germs from people's hands can transfer seven times before leaving the skin. People should wash their hands as soon as they get to work, he said.

Dr. Erin Carr-Jordan, a mother of four, started recording and posting videos of trashy playgrounds, and quickly built an international following. Her lab tests, which revealed dangerous bacteria on the equipment, have been featured on network broadcasts and in major national newspapers.

This week, Carr-Jordan was notified by an East Valley franchisee's attorney that she is no longer allowed in any of his McDonald's restaurants that have playgrounds.

"Rather than have someone come into the playgrounds and do the right thing and make them clean and safe, they told me not to come in anymore," Carr-Jordan said.

In a statement, a McDonald's spokesman said the corporation had been working with the doctor to address her concerns, but said she's become "disruptive" to employees and customers in the restaurants owned by the franchisee. The entire statement is below.

Carr-Jordan says even though she's banned, other volunteers are coming forward.

"I've had emails from all over from parents saying they'll go in to swab [the equipment]," she said.

The parents of a Maryland teen who died earlier this year during wisdom tooth surgery have sued the oral surgeon and the anesthetist for medical malpractice.

Jenny Olenick, a 17-year-old junior at Marriotts Ridge High School in Woodstock, Md., died in April from complications during the outpatient procedure performed on 5 million Americans each year.

"It's so hard," Cathy Garger, Olenick's mother, told ABCNews.com. "She was the only one we had."

The civil suit, filed in Howard Country Circuit Court, claims the oral surgeon, Dr. Domenick Coletti, and the anesthiologist, Dr. Krista Michelle Isaacs, were negligent and failed to resuscitate Olenick after her heart rate and blood oxygen level dropped.

Garger and Olenick's father, John, declined to comment on the pending case, but a spokeswoman for the family said they hope to highlight the surgery's risks and the need for better emergency training among dentists and oral surgeons.

"Something should have been done at the first sign of the emergency happening," said Nicole Cunha, a family friend and executive director of the Raven Maria Blanco Foundation -- a non-profit group dedicated to protecting pediatric dental patients. "If they hadn't waited so long, Jenny would still be here."

Coletti and Isaacs did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.

An investigation by the state's chief medical examiner ruled the cause of Olenick's death to be hypoxia -- oxygen deprivation while she was anesthetized.

Another teen, 14-year-old Ben Ellis of Gilmer County, Ga., was found dead in his bed Dec. 8 after undergoing wisdom tooth surgery the day before, ABC News affiliate WSBTV reported. The Gilmer County Sheriff's Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation are still investigating the cause of death.

Like any surgery, wisdom tooth extraction carries risks. The most common complication -- permanent nerve damage causing numbness of the tongue, lips or cheeks -- affects more than 11,000 people annually, according to a 2007 report in the American Journal of Public Health. But the surgery has also been linked to jaw and tooth fractures, brain tissue infections, life-threatening bleeding and hypoxia.

With all the risks, some dentists question whether the extraction surgeries are even necessary.

"Third-molar surgery is a multibillion-dollar industry that generates significant income for the dental profession," Jay Friedman, a California-based dental consultant and author, wrote in the American Journal of Public Health. "It is driven by misinformation and myths that have been exposed before but that continue to be promulgated by the profession."

American dentists and oral surgeons pull 10 million wisdom teeth each year -- an effort that costs more than $3 billion and leads to 11 million days of post-operative discomfort, according to the report.

"At least two thirds of these extractions, associated costs, and injuries are unnecessary, constituting a silent epidemic of [dentist-induced] injury that afflicts tens of thousands of people with lifelong discomfort and disability," Friedman wrote.

Wisdom teeth are thought to have evolved for catching, killing and eating uncooked prey, which would make them obsolete now. The argument for prophylactic removal is the risk of cysts or damage to adjacent teeth brought on by too many molars in too little space.

"If left in the mouth, impacted wisdom teeth may damage neighboring teeth and nerves, or become infected, possibly inviting systemic infections and disease as the bacteria travel through the bloodstream from your mouth to other organs of your body," reads the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons website.

But studies suggest no more than 12 percent of impactions lead to infections or damage to adjacent teeth -- roughly the same incidence as appendicitis. No medical associations recommend prophylactic appendectomy.

Wisdom Tooth Surgery: Is It Wise?

The American Public Health Associationrecommended removing wisdom teeth only based on evidence of diagnosed pathology or demonstrable need, and opposes prophylactic removal, which "subjects individuals and society to unnecessary costs, avoidable morbidity and the risks of permanent injury."

Similarly, a 1980 report by the National Institutes of Health recommended removing wisdom teeth because of infection, cavities, cysts, tumors and damage to adjacent teeth and bone. It does not recommend removing asymptomatic, fully impacted teeth.

Study: Daughters provide twice as much care for aging parents

The treadmill desk craze have always seemed more for show than officiousness, no thanks to a recent shot Victoria Beckham 'working' on one in stiletto ankle boots.

However a new study claims that using them actually increases productivity by forcing you to block out other distractions.

On top of that, researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota found that treadmill workstation users burned 74 more calories a day, on average, than they did before using the devices.

But while the study showed overall performance increased over the course of 12 months, it came a price, according to The Huffington Post.

Work performance took an immediate dive as users began using the treadmills.

The transition from a typical cubicle desk took a period of adjustment, the study, called PLOS ONE, said.
'Our study suggests that it is important to examine nonlinear effects over a relatively long period of time,' researchers concluded.

'Had we ignored nonlinearity or considered only discrete changes over arbitrary periods, we would have not estimated correctly the effects of treadmill workstations on physical activity and work performance,.

'Training in the use of treadmills for different tasks may shorten the adjustment and learning period, thus enhancing the positive effect of treadmill workstations.'

The study included about 200 employees who worked at a nonprofit financial services company, all of whom had sedentary jobs that involved a lot of time spent in front of a computer.

Some of the employees had their cubicles and offices installed with treadmill desks; they were permitted to use the treadmill desks, walking at speeds up to 2 miles per hour, as often as they wanted to (meaning they could choose to stand, sit or walk on the desks).

They also wore accelerometers to track their energy expenditure.

'Walking on the treadmill didn't come at the expense of being a productive worker,' study researcher Darla Hamann, assistant professor in the School of Urban and Public Affairs at UT Arlington, said in a statement.

'Walking seemed to augment productivity.'

Last week, fashion designer Victoria Beckham posted a photo to her Twitter walking and working on a treadmill desk, which she called 'genius'.

'Every office should have one of these,' she wrote.

However the 39-year-old, who often rides a bike to work when in New York City, happened to be wearing her signature towering heels in the shot.

Study: Daughters provide twice as much care for aging parents

The new research found that in families with children of both sexes, the gender of the child is the single biggest factor in determining who will provide care for the aging parent: Daughters will increase the time they spend with an elderly parent to compensate for sons who reduce theirs, effectively ceding the responsibility to their sisters.

The findings – which are to be presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco – suggest that traditional gender roles are the most telling factor in providing care for the elderly. How much care women provide for an aging parent is often shaped by competing concerns such as their jobs or children. Men, in contrast, base their care for an aging parent on whether a sister or the parent’s spouse can handle those responsibilities.

Angelina Grigoryeva, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Princeton University, found that daughters provide an average of 12.3 hours of elderly parent care per month as compared to sons’ 5.6 hours.

“In other words, daughters spend twice as much time, or almost seven more hours each month, providing care to elderly parents than sons,” Grigoryeva said in a written statement. She said the data suggest that despite a shift toward more gender equality in the United States in the past few decades, the imbalance is “acute” when it comes to caring for aging parents.

The paper, “When Gender Trumps Everything: The Division of Parent Care Among Siblings,”used data from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study, which surveyed more than 26,000 people over the age of 50 every two years. The association said papers presented at ASA annual meetings are “typically working papers” that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Study: Hijab Linked To Positive Body Image in Women

Study: hijab is linked to positive body image in women

September 3, 2014

Though to Western women, Muslim women in the Mid-East and Asia seem oppressed because they have no choice in wearing a hijab, the Islamic head- and body-cover common in Muslim culture, studies have shown that Muslim women have a more positive body image.

Psychologists using a wider range of body image measures have found that British Muslim women who wear a hijab generally have more positive body image, are less reliant on media messages about beauty ideals, and place less importance on appearance than those who do not wear a hijab. These effects appear to be driven by use of a hijab specifically, rather than religiosity.

A total of 587 British Muslim women completed a battery of scales assessing their frequency and conservativeness of hijab use, body image variables, attitudes towards the media and beauty ideals, importance of appearance, and religiosity. Preliminary results indicated that 218 women never used the hijab and 369 women used some form of the hijab at least rarely.

Controlling for religiosity, women who wore the hijab had more positive body image, lower internalization of media messages about beauty standards, and placed less importance on appearance than women who did not wear the hijab.

Among women who wore the hijab, hijab use significantly predicted weight discrepancy and body appreciation over and above religiosity.

“While we shouldn’t assume that wearing the hijab immunizes Muslim women from negative body image, our results do suggest that wearing the hijab may help some women reject prescriptive beauty ideals,” said Dr. Viren Swami of the Department of Psychology at University of Westminster and lead author of the paper.

A new study conducted by researchers at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine refutes previous findings that resveratrol - a compound found in red wine and chocolate - boosts longevity.

The study, which was conducted on Italians, showed that adhering to a diet rich in resveratrol such as grapes, red wine, and chocolates does not improve the health of the heart nor does it ensure longevity or reduce the incidence of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and inflammation. In fact, they are just as likely to develop the diseases as those who consume lesser amounts of the anti-oxidant.

Several studies in the past highlighted that intake of a diet rich in resveratrol lowers inflammation in a few and protects the heart.

"The story of resveratrol turns out to be another case where health benefits of a particular item are hyped but it doesn't stand the test of time," said Richard D. Semba, M.D., M.P.H., professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "The thinking was that certain food items are good for you because they contain resveratrol. We didn't find that at all."

The study results don't indicate that people should stop eating fruits or dark chocolate. "It's just that the benefits, if they are there, must come from other polyphenols or substances found in those food items," he said in a news release. "These are complex foods, and all we really know from our study is that the benefits are probably not due to resveratrol," added Semba.

The study was done on 783 people aged above 65 years, residents of Tuscany, where the consumption of wine is high. They were not on any diet. Their urine samples of 24 hours were analysed for metabolites of resveratrol.

The researchers took into consideration certain factors like age and gender. It was noticed that those with highest concentration of resveratrol metabolites didn't have any reduced risk of dying as compared to those with no resveratrol in their urine samples. The urine samples were analyzed using advanced mass spectrometry.

They ask you (O Muhammad ) concerning alcoholic drink and gambling. Say: "In them is a great sin, and (some) benefit for men, but the sin of them is greater than their benefit." And they ask you what they ought to spend. Say: "That which is beyond your needs." Thus Allâh makes clear to you His Laws in order that you may give thought. [2:219]

And

Narrated Tariq ibn Suwayd or Suwayd ibn Tariq: Wa'il said: Tariq ibn Suwayd or Suwayd ibn Tariq asked the Prophet about wine, but he forbade it. He again asked him, but he forbade him. He said to him: Prophet of Allah, it is a medicine. The Prophet said:No it is a disease. [Abu Dawood]

Study after study has shown that black men do more time in jail than white men who commit similar crimes — an entrenched racial disparity in the nation’s justice system that Attorney General Eric Holder has decried as “shameful” and unacceptable.

But a new study finds that a previously ignored factor has an even larger impact than race on whether and for how long a person will go to jail: U.S. citizenship.

Immigrants who lack citizenship are four times more likely to be sent to jail than U.S. citizens who committed the same crimes, according to a study of federal sentencing data to be published in the American Sociological Review this month. Once they’re in jail, immigrants serve two to four months longer than the average citizen convicted of the same crime.

This sentencing gap between citizens and noncitizens is even larger than ones found between black defendants and white defendants, according to Michael T. Light, the study’s author and an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University. Lacking citizenship appears to be worse news for a defendant than his or her race. A white noncitizen faces more jail time, on average, than a black U.S. citizen convicted of the same crime, the study found.

Citizenship “appears to trump race and ethnicity when determining punishments for those who violate U.S. law,” the study concludes. The effect was starkest for undocumented immigrants, but even legal immigrants faced significantly longer sentences than citizens convicted of the same crimes, regardless of their race. Most of the sentencing disparity between Hispanics and whites could be explained by the higher percentage of noncitizens in the Hispanic group, the study found.

The sentencing gap appears to have grown with the size of the noncitizen population of the country, which has expanded to about 38 million people. Non-citizens make up more than a quarter of the country’s federal inmates. They are generally deported once their sentence is up. Most noncitizens in prison are serving time for federal immigration crimes, but the researchers examined only non-immigration offenses committed by noncitizens to be able to compare them to the same crimes committed by citizens.

It’s unclear why non-citizens are punished more severely by the courts. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that undocumented immigrants have a right to due process — and legal immigrants should be treated the same by the law. Light theorizes that the disparity might be a reflection of public opinion. A majority of Americans say in polls that they believe immigrants are likely to cause higher crime rates. This perception of higher criminality could result in harsher punishments.

Holder has called racial disparities in sentencing "unacceptable" and has launched a series of reforms aimed at rolling back mandatory minimums for drug crimes in order to combat them. It’s unclear if these reforms would help close the citizen-noncitizen gap as well, Light said. “Any policy aimed at avoiding unwarranted disparities is a good thing,” he said. “It’s not that we shouldn’t focus on race and ethnicity, but that we should also include nationality.”

It’s no surprise that such disparity exists, and it is clear why non-citizens are punished more severely. It’s a white privileged society in a whit privileged world. Most in power are white, put there by their own kind. Just a few months ago a story broke of a white judge selling black kids to private prisons and shamelessly claiming his white privileged “entitlement” to earn money over it. And what did he get for his crime? Just 28 years in prison. (http://personaladvisory.com/2013/08/...ns-to-prisons/) And if blacks didn’t have it bad enough, these nationalists will unjustly set an example of non-citizens, even legal ones with legal residential status and a green card. This is the justice system of the nationalistic ethno-centric war mongering west.

For the study, researchers divided parents into two groups: those with jobs that are not people-oriented jobs (considered technical) and those with people-oriented jobs (considered nontechnical). They found that fathers who worked in finance were four times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum than those with the nontechnical jobs (which could include those in media, education, or sales industries, for example). And those who worked in health care (working in a medical lab, for example) were six times more likely. A mother’s job held no association to autistic offspring unless both she and her husband worked in technical fields. In that case, their children were at a higher risk of developing a more severe case of autism.

“We aren’t exactly sure why, but we speculate that people who choose these technical fields do so because their brains are wired differently — they may be more antisocial, prefer to focus on one thing at a time, and not talk a lot. We see those traits in autism too,” lead first author Aisha S. Dickerson, PhD, a researcher at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, tells Yahoo Shine. “It’s also possible that some adults in tech fields are on the far end of the autism spectrum level themselves, but are undiagnosed with mild cases or don’t need diagnoses at all.” Dickerson adds that it’s possible that the disorder can be genetically passed from one parent to the offspring or from the genetic combination of both parents’ DNA.

And while past research has found that highly educated parents and those of high socioeconomic status were more likely to have autistic children, Dickerson’s study adjusted for those factors to pinpoint the parent’s occupation as a possible link. “However, parents in technical fields who are expecting should not begin worrying that their child will have autism,” says Dickerson. “These results are only a steppingstone to further understand the condition as a whole.”

Dickerson’s work echoes research conducted in 2011 by Cambridge University in England, which found that three times as many children were diagnosed with autism in a region of the Netherlands known as being a tech-industry hub than in areas with fewer tech jobs.

Autism spectrum disorders are a group of developmental disabilities that can cause social, communication, and behavioral challenges. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about 1 in 68 American children are diagnosed, and the condition is more common among boys than girls.

The cause of autism is a source of constant debate, largely fueled by an antivaccine movement led in part by celebrities, including Kristin Cavallari and Jenny McCarthy, who recently backtracked on her stance. The theory gained traction thanks to a 1998 study that has since been widely discredited. Others believe that autism is caused by environmental factors such as certain household chemicals and pesticides. One small study published in March 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the disorder starts in the womb, specifically in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. The idea is that both genes and some outside influences (for example, contracting the flu while pregnant) work together to disrupt brain development. "It has to be something that involves mom, something that she is exposed to or that is happening to her," study author Eric Courchesne PhD of the University of California, San Diego’s Autism Center of Excellence told NBC News.

There may be truth to the studies considering those working in technical fields are often working with electronic devices that give off all kinds of wave length frequencies as well as possible radiation of some level, depending which technical field one is in. As for anti-vaccine movement that appears to be ‘discredited’, there is ample evidence out there suggesting otherwise.

According to a new study, people are less likely to believe information if it comes from a person whose name is difficult for them to pronounce.

The study was conducted with college undergrads in New Zealand and Canada. The students were first asked to rank the "pronounceability" of real names from 18 different languages. Then, the students were given a list of possibly real, possibly fake facts attributed to people with a range of invented names. The students were much more likely to believe that "Putali Angami" was truthful than "Yevgeni Dzherzhinsky," because, according to the study's participants, "Putali Angami" was easier to pronounce.

The study authors said the results show the way that our own subconscious opinions can affect not only who we believe, but who we hire for a job and who we decide to buy things from.

"The results from these experiments showed that people with easier to pronounce names were judged as more familiar, less risky and less dangerous than individuals with difficult to pronounce names," Matti Vuorre explained in Scientific American. Of course, he pointed out, "difficult to pronounce" depends totally on what your native language is. "So, who would you pick as your tandem skydiving partner, Bodo or Czeslaw? If you are anything like most English speaking people, you would be likely to prefer jumping out of the plane with Bodo. If, on the other hand, you find Polish easier to pronounce, you would probably choose to jump with Czeslaw."

In the United States, these subconscious beliefs about names sometimes seep into the workplace. A separate study conducted over several years in the United States, and published in 2013, showed that immigrants who "Americanized" their names were more likely to get jobs than ones who opted not to. They also ended up making more money.

There are major race and gender-related implications in deciding whose name is perceived to be more pronounceable. Some names fall in and out of fashion, and a celebrity with an uncommon name can make their moniker go mainstream — after all, a lot more Americans can pronounce "Schwarzenegger" or "Ejiofor" now than they could two decades ago.

The impact of gender was studied in a 2009 survey onfemale judges in South Carolina. Two professors from George Mason University found that female attorneys in the state were more likely to win judgeships if they had a gender-neutral or ambiguous name like Terry or Kelly than if they had a more traditionally feminine ones like Susan or Laurie. One of the professors who authored the study was so convinced of the power of gender-neutral names that he named his own daughter Collins.

And Vuorre, who has a somewhat hard-to-pronounce name himself, was hyperaware of these facts as he wrote his story: "As a recent immigrant to the United States, I wonder whether I should worry about the potential negative implications of my name on my future career success. At the very least, as Dr. Newman and her colleagues’ results suggest: People might find this article to be more credible if I had a different name. Or, as I like to think, you are less likely to go skydiving with me than you would be if my name was Brad Pitt."

"Brad Pitt" may be pretty easy to pronounce, but what happens to his children who have names like Zahara and Shiloh (as two of his kids do)? Something tells us they'll be just fine when it comes to the making-money department.

It’s called bias towards familiarity and prejudice towards difference. People, especially westerners, want you to adopt their names and culture and forget your own so as to show that you have become “one of them”. This is so much so that any international Asian student that goes to study in Australia is given an Anglo Australian first name by the Australian agent they are working with. And yet, Australia is still very intolerant and racist towards non-Anglos all the while claiming to be a “multicultural” society. Other Anglo western societies are the same. There was an experiment done in the US with Muslim names. Same resumes were sent out to employers first with Muslim names and then with American names, 80% of American name resumes were contacted for interviews compared to the Muslim name resumes.

Now, thanks to two recent studies, there is evidence that language-learning actually sharpens your brain by changing its mechanics.

One of the studies, published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, observed strengthening neural connections between different parts of the brain in people who underwent language training. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies taught 23 people the meaning and tone of 48 Chinese language words over a period of six weeks, and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure how the subjects’ brains changed. In subjects who identified the correct tone or illustration for a word, experimenters observed that parts of the brain that hadn’t previously connected much were creating stronger paths, co-author Ping Li told Quartz.

The building of stronger connections over time between regions of the brain implies that bilingual brains are “more resistant to damage,” said Li, a professor of psychology, linguistics and information sciences and technology at Penn State. The findings support the notion that language-learning can fend off dementia.

(Journal of Neurolinguistics/Pennsylvania State University)

The deeper the understanding of the language, the stronger the brain’s regional connectivity: In subjects who had been exposed to the lessons but hadn’t learned as successfully, the connections were often no better than the monolingual subjects.

Another study (pdf), from researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Houston and published in the journal Brain and Language, used fMRIs to examine the blood flow in 18 English speakers and 17 people who had been speaking both English and Spanish since childhood. The fMRI shows the blood flow to different parts of the brain, which makes it possible to see how hard someone is working to solve a problem.

For this study, researchers said a word in English, then showed the subjects an illustration of the object that word described along with other objects. The brains of bilinguals were far less taxed in choosing the right photo and better able to ignore irrelevant words that came to mind, lead author and Northwestern University communications sciences and disorders professor Viorica Marian told Quartz.

Sexy women in bikinis really do inspire some men to see them as objects, according to a new study of male behavior.

Brain scans revealed that when men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up.

Men were also more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person action verbs such as "I push, I grasp, I handle," said lead researcher Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University.

And in a "shocking" finding, Fiske noted, some of the men studied showed no activity in the part of the brain that usually responds when a person ponders another's intentions.

This means that these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds," Fiske said. "The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens."

Dehumanizing

Fiske and colleagues asked 21 heterosexual male volunteers to first take a test that scores people based on different types of sexist attitudes. The subjects were then shown pictures of both skimpily dressed and fully clothed men and women.

Most of the men best remembered headless photographs of women in bikinis, even if they'd only seen the image for two-tenths of a second, Fiske reported this weekend in Chicago during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

And the men who scored higher as "hostile sexists"—those who view women as controlling and invaders of male space—didn't show brain activity that indicates they saw the women in bikinis as humans with thoughts and intentions.

Scientists have seen this absence of activation only once before, in a study where people were shown off-putting photographs of homeless people and drug addicts.

If a similar study were done with women, Fiske told National Geographic News, it would be hard to predict whether a woman shown a scantily clad male body would dehumanize him in the same way.

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that women tend to look for mates who have wealth and power, so some of Fiske's colleagues have suggested running a similar test where women are shown pictures of men next to expensive cars or other affluent symbols.

But Fiske doesn't think such an experiment would work the same way, because women usually react to men they desire by "interpreting their minds, thinking about what they're interested in, and then trying to please them," she said.

More Than Half Of American Public Schoolchildren Now Live In Poverty: Study

By Rebecca Klein - 01/16/2015

For the first time, more than half of U.S. public school students live in low-income households, according to a new analysis from the Southern Education Foundation.

Overall, 51 percent of U.S. schoolchildren came from low-income households in 2013, according to the foundation, which analyzed data from National Center for Education Statistics on students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Eligibility for free or subsidized lunch for students from low-income households serves as a proxy for gauging poverty, says the foundation, which advocates education equity for students in the South.

The report shows the percentage of schoolchildren from poor households has grown steadily for nearly a quarter-century, from 32 percent in 1989. "By 2006, the national rate was 42 percent and, after the Great Recession, the rate climbed in 2011 to 48 percent," says the report.

Kent McGuire, president of the Southern Education Foundation, told The Washington Post that the analysis shows poverty has reached a "watershed moment."

The fact is, we've had growing inequality in the country for many years, McGuire said. It didnt happen overnight, but its steadily been happening. Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now were a country disinclined to invest in our young people.

The analysis shows the highest percentages of poor students in Southern and Western states. Mississippi had the highest rate of low-income students -- 71 percent. New Hampshire had the lowest, at 27 percent.

No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low income students simply a matter of fairness," the report says. "... Their success or failure in the public schools will determine the entire body of human capital and educational potential that the nation will possess in the future."

Anastasia Steele's biggest defeat may not have been submitting to her abuser's sexual desires, but convincing other women that the behavior was okay. At least that's the finding of a new study in the Journal of Women's Health, which claims young adult women who read Fifty Shades of Grey are more likely to replicate the behaviors of people in abusive relationships.

In the book series, Anastasia 'Ana' Steele is constantly afraid; not only of her abusive partner, Christian Grey, but of the realization that she is losing her sense of self. Though Ana's behavior is initially survivalist, it eventually become engrained as she automatically responds to her partner's abuse. Though fictional, the storyline is a chillingly accurate portrayal of very real life relationships.

The study: In a sample of 650 women aged 18-24, researchers at Michigan State University found that Fifty Shades of Grey readers were 25% more likely to have a partner who yelled or swore at them. Readers were also 34% more likely to have a partner who displayed stalking tendencies and 75% more likely to have fasted for more than 24 hours or used a diet aid. Worse still, women who read all three books in the series were more likely to regularly binge drink and have multiple sex partners, both of which are recognized risk factors for intimate partner violence.

One thing the study couldn't determine was whether women who engaged in risky behaviors started doing so before or after reading the books. Regardless of the order of the activity, the books could either have brought on the behaviors or further encouraged them, lead study author and behavioral scientist Amy Bonomi said in a press release. This is backed up by past research has shown that when we are consistently shown images that reinforce a specific behavior or body type, we are more likely to internalize those images and see them as normal.

Normalizing dangerous relationships: While the research might be bad news for 50 Shades fans, it's important that we recognize how media depictions of abusive relationships can encourage the behavior in the real world. Intimate partner violence is a very real problem. Every minute, about 24 Americans are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner. That's about 12 million men and women each year. Nearly 1 in 5 women (18%) and 1 in 71 men (1%) are raped during their lifetime.

Books, magazines and films that ignore this reality delegitimize the pain experienced by real-life survivors of abusive relationships. If you're looking for a real heroine, put down the book and start a healthy conversation with a friend instead.

Bitter melon, also known as wild cucumber or bitter apple, grows in Asia, East Africa, South America and the Caribbean. It is consumed as food and also has many medicinal effects. Science is now looking at this plant’s therapeutic effects, especially in relation to treating diabetes and some types of cancer. The findings are promising and suggest there might be yet another alternative for chronic conditions often considered incurable.

Bitter melon helps regulate insulin levels, and this is what might make it efficient in treating conditions related to pancreas where this hormone is produced. In vitro and animal studies also showed antiviral and lipid (fat) lowering effect. Traditionally, this fruit, which is believed to be the most bitter among all fruits and vegetables, was used to treat colic, fever, pain, skin conditions and burns.

Bitter Melon And Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is one of the fastest progressing cancers and doesn’t respond to conventional treatment such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

A study performed at the Colorado University examined the effects of bitter melon on pancreatic cancer. The study was done in vitro on four different lines of pancreatic cancer cells, and on mice injected with pancreatic tumor cells.

The researchers observed that bitter melon juice stopped cancer cell proliferation and caused them to die. Tumor growth was reduced by 60% compared to the control group that received water. There were no signs of toxicity or side effects on the body.

Numerous clinical studies assessed bitter melon in relation to diabetes. Not all of these studies reached the same conclusion.

A study published in 2011 in Journal of Ethnopharmacology, showed that bitter melon significantly reduced blood glucose levels among patients with type 2 diabetes and had a modest hypoglycemic effect. However, an earlier study, published in Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2007, showed no benefits of bitter melon for type 2 diabetes.
The website MemorialSloan Kettering Cancer Center — the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center — reports that ‘bitter melon can lower blood glucose levels, but it is not known how it interacts with insulin or other medications’. Also, the correct dosage hasn’t been established yet, therefore bitter melon cannot be considered as a replacement therapy for insulin or hypoglycemic drugs.

How to Consume Bitter Melon

Bitter melon can be eaten as a fruit, made into a drink, or the seeds can be added to food. Bitter melon extract is also available as a herbal supplement.

If eaten in excessive amounts, the plant can cause abdominal pain and diarrhea, so don’t consume more than two ounces (or two melons) per day

Bitter melon shouldn’t be eaten by pregnant women as it can cause a miscarriage and the seed coverings are supposed to be toxic in children.

If you are considering using bitter melon for a health condition, you should consult your doctor first, and check it doesn’t interact with any medications you are currently taking.

A study released earlier this month relied on the "2D:4D" ratio to determine that 57% of men are inclined to be promiscuous. Now, a second study says the same ratio—which makes use of the length of the index and ring fingers—can also indicate how nice men are to women. The study, published in Personality and Individual Differences, notes that a lower ratio "indicates greater androgen exposure"; in less scientific-speak, it means the longer a man's ring finger compared to his index finger, the more male hormones (chief among them testosterone) he was exposed to in the womb.

As lead author Debbie Moskowitz explains in a McGill University press release, "When with women, men with smaller ratios were more likely to listen attentively, smile and laugh, compromise or compliment the other person."

The results stemmed from 155 participants' self-reported behavior. Over the course of 20 days, they selected which behaviors they exhibited in any social interaction of at least five minutes. The researchers mapped those behaviors as agreeable or quarrelsome, and discovered men with lower digit ratios reported roughly a third more agreeable behaviors with women, and also a third fewer quarrelsome ones.

The results went beyond the romantic: They held regardless of who the woman was, from a romantic partner to a co-worker. But in terms of the romantic, Moskowitz noted her findings may support previous research that also linked smaller ratios to having more kids. "Our research suggests they have more harmonious relationships with women ... This might explain why they have more children on average." Somewhat incongruously though, the smaller-ratio men were the ones who fell into the potentially more promiscuous camp in the previous study.